Ruins at Dusk
by Kyilliki
Summary: Of burning pages, Caius and Didyme, and other things that cannot last.
1. original beauty

**RUINS AT DUSK**

**CHARACTERS/PAIRINGS: **Caius/Didyme, Didyme/Marcus, Aro

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **Gods help me, I've begun a Caius/Didyme fic. Really, I blame the entire thing on Merina2, who invented the pairing and made the mistake of telling me about it. The chapter headings and title are borrowed from the 2x5obsessions community over on livejournal.

This fic comes with a handful of warnings: it isn't canon, the ending won't necessarily be happy, and an M rating is warranted.

As ever, please let me know what you think.

* * *

><p><em>original beauty/_

"She's beautiful," Marcus breathed.

The memory of Aro's prone sister, a thrashing, screaming scrap of a girl, wandered through Caius' mind uninvited; she was not lovely. There was a shadow of the unformed, a blurred and hasty softness about her features, as though she was a rushed statue. The artless product of a distracted sculptor.

It was true, in the worst of ways. _Cautious_ had never been one of Aro's epithets.

"You need to be careful," he said mildly. "I doubt Aro will appreciate your intentions."

"What intentions? Did I say anything about intentions?" Marcus laughed, blissfully transparent in his joy.

The creature in question had not yet opened her eyes, and the conversation meant little to her, Caius hoped, with the sinking knowledge that he was probably wrong.

}-o-{

Caius watched Didyme, a slender, night-haired catalyst, as she re-shaped the bonds between his brothers. Talentless though he was in that regard, he could sense something cutting the air, sharp as drawn steel while Aro and Marcus silently sparred over the restless hurricane of a newborn, the terrain they owned in her heart.

Her gift, Aro decided, had that unfortunate side effect. Caius wanted to call him a liar. He knew the taste of happiness, the familiar and vivid warmth of it. What Didyme summoned from him was something else entirely.

_This_ was fire, ugly and starved and impossible to stop.

She consumed him from within. Stole thoughts and peace, diverting them into an endless contemplation of her. He couldn't say whether he wanted to touch her, kill her or flee from her.

_Touch her_ won. Every damn time.

}-o-{

In his fever dreams, she was so pretty beneath the spring-coloured dresses she wore, all pale and curving and eagerly innocent. The dark riot of her hair slipped everywhere, tickling his face and falling over her spine, until he wound his fingers in it tightly and tugged it aside. When her throat was revealed to him, he did not spare the teeth, marking and biting until her venom coated his lips and she moaned and mewled in half-pain.

Which isn't to say that she didn't enjoy it.

His hands, not quite gentle because they never had been, slipped over her shoulders and onto her breasts, pinching and stroking peaked flesh while her words turned to chaos. His mouth pressed against the honey-scented dip of her shoulder and murmured how perfect she was, how beautiful and sweet and good.

Only when Didyme turned pliant beneath his palms would he consider lifting her—she was so delicate, so breathlessly fragile, after all— onto his bed. Her little hands stopped being dainty then and clutched, stumbled, tore the sheets to rags. The smooth slide and opening of her legs was a revelation of slick heat and fluttering want, the taste of summer and _her_ enough to drive his mind into darkness.

Caius wondered, almost absently, how he would occupy his fingers and mouth when he was deep inside her. Perhaps she preferred gentle words, lips upon the shadows of her throat, bites that scarred, heavy hands cradling her hips.

He did not know. The fantasy turned pale then, as though leaving spaces for Didyme's contribution.

The aftermath, after he snarled her name into the black crown of her hair when he came, was a tangle of limbs, Didyme curled up beside him a little like a kitten. He knew, with a besotted certainty that frightened him, that he would kiss her everywhere, especially those places where he had closed his teeth too hard, then tell her precisely what she wanted to hear and mean all of it.

}-o-{

Caius caught himself free-wheeling, utterly rudderless, between fear and desire too often. The nights were clawed and clotted with blood, the days of feigned normalcy worse.

His jaw a rigid line, he told himself coolly and repeatedly that Aro could not touch him again, that he could not speak freely to his other, enamoured brother with the too-knowing gift.

The girl would not be thought of, until the madness passed and she became Marcus' mate.


	2. of an approaching storm

_/of an approaching storm/_

Caius paced, a nerve-straining habit that burrowed beneath Didyme's skin. His heavy footfalls were arrhythmic, as though they matched the tempo of his thoughts. With the threat of a storm and a sky made sodden by rain, he was a trapped thing, chafing at the bars of some cage his mind had constructed for him.

She found him in a perfectly public corridor soon enough, with uncertain intentions. This difficult, white-haired man startled her as much as ever, unyielding and unforgiving as stone.

There was something to be said for lethal curiosity. That _something_ probably wasn't good, but Didyme could not bring herself to care. Endless thirst and noise had stripped her of caution.

"You are avoiding me," she said, matching his steps. The silver bracelets she had twined around her wrists sparked and sang, unravelling the silence with trills of laughter.

Caius said nothing at all.

"And I don't know why. You see, I'm famously likeable," Didyme grinned, voicing the most honest of exaggerations. It was her talent, Aro had explained, that drew men to her like wasps to rotting fruit, but he was wrong. He had not known her while she was mortal.

"Infamously," he corrected, matching her with a smile as sudden and swift as summer lightning.

"That too."

"I have nothing to say to you."

She could tell that he aimed for calmness, the self-reproach only the lonely could summon, but it came out wrong. Harsh and closed.

"You can think of something, I'm sure."

Prying fingers and meandering wit had worked well in the past, with different subjects.

"Isn't there someone elsewhere whom you can bother?" he said, exasperated.

And then, she caught it. A shadow and a sliver of caution, as though Caius was afraid of over-stepping some nameless boundary. Painful surprise whirled aimlessly in her chest, as she realized that she was already Marcus', though no words and fewer promises had been exchanged.

Didyme wondered if that needled her companion half as much as it bothered her.

"You are a terrible brother," she dismissed, her voice teasing though her eyes remained berry-dark and untouched by merriment.

There was a certain safety in seeing him as a sibling. She found that it displeased her—one brother was more than enough.

"We are _family _now?"

He nearly laughed, and Didyme knew that she had won herself a tolerant acquaintance at very least.

"Of course."

"That would make you the worst little sister possible," Caius said. His fingers, paler than her own and rougher, tangled in her hair for a heartbeat, but the gesture was so quick that she could have imagined it.


	3. shadows' dance

_/shadows' dance/  
><em>

Didyme's hand shivered beneath the brittle shell of Caius' palm, frantically warm, a bird's heart.

It had not been his idea, this careless intimacy. She looped her too-trusting fingers through his, declared she was thirsty, and pulled him into night and silence. Once the red walls of Velathri were at their backs, she paused, her little nails tapping an atonal pattern over his bones.

"That was abrupt." Her grin shimmered, a play of sullen moonlight and the absolute abhorrence of apologies she shared with her brother. "But Aro says I cannot hunt alone."

Exquisite trust lingered in those fawn's eyes, the belief gilded by childhood that her brother only cherished her and wished to keep an ugly world from sinking its talons into her scarless skin.

He knew that the expression tugging at his lips was far from kind.

"Don't listen to him," he said.

"I did not think that you'd encourage disobedience." Her smile was a revolution.

"I am only suggesting that you consider intentions."

He had never voiced such treachery before.

"Anyone's in particular?"

Standing on tiptoe, Didyme touched his cheek with a hand that weighed nothing, a ghostly, glowing splay of fingers.

She was invasive. Insidious as Aro. Caius could not pretend he did not like it.

He jolted away, as though his skin had been touched by fire. The warmth that drowned him from within reminded him of her gift, that small scrap of circumstance that made liars out of the both of them.

"No."

}-o-{

For a newborn, Didyme hunted with too much discrimination. She turned a dainty nose up at most of the mortals she stumbled upon, strays at the outskirts of villages, dismissing their scent and sluggish hearts.

"I prefer it when they're in love," she said. "It's something in the blood."

Her wide, black gaze rested on Caius, demanding a similar confession.

He could think of nothing to say, only gesturing in the direction of a human girl who had wandered to fetch water from a well.

"Will she do?"

Didyme grinned, revealing perfect rows of blade-sharp teeth.

"She smells of—joy," she breathed, and became a blur, her pale tunic billowing like storm-tossed sails behind her. Beneath her sandals, the road turned to bone dust and looped starlight, beauty wrought from nothing.

Screams cut the night into jagged shapes, and Caius wanted to snarl something barbed at the dark-haired girl, ordering her to keep her kill silent, until he saw her laugh, a flash of pallor amidst staining crimson falling in sheets. Sweet Didyme, Aro's perfect, porcelain sister liked to hear humans writhe and beg and pray against her flesh while she killed.

Such picturesque brutality.

Of course she preferred it when her victims were in love. They struggled so much harder then.

Venom stung the white-hot desert of his mouth, and he could not say why he burned.

}-o-{

In time, Didyme straightened from her hunter's crouch, unfolding like an odd flower. Unsteady as a sparrow on her feet, she flung a lovely smile at him.

"Do you want to try it?" she murmured, gesturing to the sticky stains that adorned her like sacrificial blood on an idol's statue.

Waiting for responses was not in her nature.

"Come here," she ordered.

He complied, each of his steps light and eager, like those of a child. _Too much power over me_, he mused, without giving the thought any weight.

Nothing remained in the copper-haired corpse's veins, not even lingering red blossoms around the place where Didyme had clamped her mouth, but her hands were a crimson mess. She offered them to him, a breath-stealing canvass that smelled of death and want.

Eyes like old gems gazed at him gleefully, a dare wrapped in the most innocent of gestures.

He caught her wrist so hard that he could hear the nervous strain of bone.

His mouth wandered over Didyme's palm, forgetting to be cautious as his tongue curled over smooth flesh. Sweetness itself lingered upon her, even beneath the heady spill of red. As he closed his lips over the taut crescent of skin between her forefinger and thumb, sucking it as though it was the rind of some strange and colourless fruit, he lost himself. Forgot the bonds he had so artfully forged between his black-haired brothers and the loyalty he owed.

And to think, Caius had thought himself _clever_ once. Cold, even.

He ripped himself away.

"You must admit that I have good taste in humans," she said, smug and bouncing on the pads of her feet. Inappropriate triumph made her madly beautiful, lending an edge of iron to the blown glass of her features.

"Only passably."

"Why must you be contrary?" Flecks of blood clung to her lashes and her lips, making her smirk sinister.

"Why must you be adored?" he parried, albeit with no real cruelty.

She flinched nonetheless, wary as wounded fox.

"What else do I have, Caius?" Didyme's teeth clasped dully, trying to catch words that he was not meant to hear.

"Marcus, my dear."

}-o-{

The return to Velathri was rushed, hounded by the coming dawn. Didyme's hand was a desperate bundle of stone in Caius' grasp once more, and she clung as though letting go would mean her death.

It would be sufficient, for a while.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>This chapter was a little slow, but the one after it will speed up the plot. I couldn't resist an opportunity to torture Caius and Didyme a little bit first.


	4. a bond with darkness

_/a bond with darkness/_

The dying sun was unkind to Aro's study, illuminating ugliness that dust and night curtained. Spider-web fissures in stone whispered of decay and desperation, while carelessly thawing candles wept wax onto old oak, so pitted and pale that it was not worth saving. A mosaic's gambolling beasts, made eyeless by crumbling tile, gazed and condemned balefully.

The room whispered of the haphazard, things cobbled together with nails and prayer.

Aro sighed, his fingers a nervous knit. In his pacing, he had hugged the red walls until they left his shoulders streaked with red dust and recrimination.

"We must find a role for Didyme, my brothers," he said, settling into a chair with ill ease. Sentiment turned his features to clay, pliant and soft, easy to read as any dramatic mask, and he did not like it.

"She is still so young," Marcus said lightly. "There is time."

There had always been a tastelessly apparent streak of gentleness to his character, Aro mused, eyeing his dearest friend indulgently. He permitted it only because he had found a bitter counterpoint in Caius.

"All the better. Leaving her purposeless is an insult to her many charms," he said, swiping restless hands through black hair.

In the distance, Aro fancied that he could hear the patter and glide of Didyme's return. A rush, a salty panic rose in his throat.

"Her gift will find you followers." Impatience lined Caius' features in careless strokes.

"Indeed," he conceded, disliking the idea of newborn recruits who were loyal to Didyme. Perhaps she was a silly girl—although Aro doubted even that—but she could not remain untarnished, surely. It would not do to give her power of any sort.

"We need numbers, brother. I do not care what ruse is used in the process," the white-haired man said, pointedly meeting Marcus' gaze, as though seeking a challenge.

Aro feigned hesitation, his fingertips fluttering in strange shapes upon faded wood.

"Using my little sister as an enticement strikes me as—unfortunate."

"Spare me," Caius hissed.

"I will speak to her," Marcus offered. A comfortable, laughing lilt lingered amongst his words.

Aro stiffened. How utterly predictable for his brother to play the diplomat, but perhaps there was too much eagerness there, a singular, silken longing—

He discarded the thought.

"My thanks." An insinuation of endings shadowed the pronouncement.

}-o-{

"_You are very beautiful,"_ Marcus had said.

He possessed an aptitude for sincerity, Didyme noted, a perfect and guileless slant of phrase that warmed her like candlelight. For a moment, she had even believed him, before she remembered how strange her eyes were, red and raw beneath winged lashes.

"_And kind—that is a rarity._"

His fingers had been so tender when they brushed over her knuckles, as though he worried that she would crumble like badly burned petals. She unravelled her hands from their uncertain tangles for him, permitting an exploration of her palms. The sweetness of touch and of _him_ singed her throat.

"_Immortals will listen to what you say. How could they not?"_ Something exposed, a desire and a wound, tarried behind those words, but Didyme recoiled.

Aro wanted her to be his mouthpiece. An elegant echo, an appeal to innocence, in the form of a girl. And Marcus, with his shy smile and fire-eyed faith, would not protest. _Could not_, perhaps. He was Aro's friend, his best-loved ally—

Didyme bit back a scream that choked like smoke. A sister's mantle did not quite suit her, and yet her brother presumed to deepen his hold upon her. Even the good grace to tell her so in person evaded him.

She smiled until it dizzied her all the while, remembering blood and the hunt, and Caius' sour reminder that Marcus was hers.

It would not do to lose him.

}-o-{

Hours later, Didyme found Caius walking too quickly through a labyrinth of corridors, their sides opening into a courtyard and ushering in the sound of rain. She would not pretend that she did not seek him.

"What do you want from me?" she demanded, her voice reaching impossibly sharp notes.

The air between them sang like struck silver.

"I don't understand," he said, unflinching. His hands were fists at his side, pale-veined and brutal. Neither kind nor beautiful.

"Everyone desires _something_ of me. What is that you want?" Her fingers shackled his wrists. The need to feel, to reassure herself that her companion was more than a ghost devoured her whole. Flesh and stone cracked like porcelain, the fissures shallow and seaming immediately.

"Nothing at all," Caius said.

Perhaps he lied, but Didyme doubted it. He was too uncaring, this other, wintry brother, to soften his speech for her.

She raised herself on tiptoe. Touched his cheek as she always did, surprised that the cold of it did not sting her skin. Her lips lingered in the wake of her hands, uncertain and punctuated by the sweep of lashes.

The expectation of refusal, the sure and icy knowledge that Caius would shrug her away, calling her too young, too stupid and someone else's made her bold.

His lips tasted of old copper. She was quite convinced hers did too.

And then, it was all mouths and misplaced teeth and fire sparking within her belly. Didyme's toes, balletically taut, gave way in an instant, but she did not fall. In the space of seconds, Caius had tangled his arms around her so thoroughly that she could go nowhere but nearer to him.

It was neither safety nor love, this sharp and desperate friction between them, but she took it eagerly nonetheless. Curled so close that there was no whisper of space separating them and drowned him with kisses like blood.

He drew back first, laughing at the way her black hair had wandered wildly into the embrace. While Didyme tripped upon the first untrue word of an apology, he pulled her after him, into the waiting darkness of alcove's mouth, where they could not be seen.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE:<strong> The hardest thing to do while writing love triangles is making no-one seem utterly despicable. I hope Marcus is forgiven for being terribly oblivious in this chapter; that trait seems to be his downfall in canon and outside of it.

On a related note, I've been asked a handful of times where Athenodora is. Since even the Twilight Guide has a contradictory answer to this question, I feel it's acceptable for me to say that she'll be along in a little while. Just not yet.

Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who read and reviewed the previous chapter. I've fallen behind on review responses, but your encouraging words mean the world to me.


	5. eye of the beholder

/_eye of the beholder/_

The afternoon promised rain. Clouds unrolled in stormy skeins over the horizon, painting daylight the shade of blood, while thunder stretched and growled in the middle distance.

Didyme was nowhere to be found.

Marcus was not surprised._  
><em>

An absence of sun was all the permission she needed to flee the sombre catacombs of their home, losing herself in the red labyrinth of Velathri. She was the most casually unruly newborn he had yet encountered. Not vicious— that was too ugly an epithet for her wildfire eyes, the mad patter of her hands— but whimsical. Impractically giddy. He did not know that his thoughts could taste of summer honey until they had wrapped themselves around her.

He searched for her in the watery shadows and haunted corners of their city, where her scent and footprints lingered.

She was playing with him, he realized. Trailing her fingers over stonework, doubling back, darting over rooftops and courtyards with equal caprice. Grinning, Marcus followed, as he always would when Didyme asked. That unsought loyalty shocked him in warm frissons, but it could not frighten him.

Beneath the green underbelly of a laurel tree, he caught sight of her, a laughing, lovely blur.

"Found you," she whispered when he flickered to her side.

"The opposite, I would think," he said. Her gaze was red as the berries he plucked as a child, and so eagerly pressed into his mouth, until his chin was a sticky-sweet mess.

Regardless of circumstance, she steered his mind to joy.

"I did not make this simple for you," she said, mischief in her smile. "Your efforts are commendable."

"I must admit that I did not seek you solely for my own amusement," Marcus said. "Your brother has a task for you."

Her features darkened, as though fog had descended over moonlight. Her grief became his, tearing at him with cat's claws, and the desire to kiss her eyelids until she smiled once more became oppressive.

The wisest choice, Marcus decided, was to look at the ground.

"He did not tell me," she said, her voice splintering like dry birch.

"Aro is a busy man, and an absentminded one. You must forgive him that," he offered. It was not a lie, he consoled himself, disliking the thought of misleading his companion. His black-haired brother was brilliant, grandly so, but details fled from him.

She sighed impatiently, taking him by the arm. Her hands were fine as glass, and just as frail.

}-o-{

Caius waited. That was unusual. Immortals had always come to him, their faces pinched and eager in equal parts. The power to twist minds into the jagged shapes of fear had always satisfied him, though it was nothing like the talents his half-family possessed.

And yet, he was willing to sit on cold stone, idle-handed and sullen with boredom because Didyme's time was Aro's as well. If her brother wanted her to linger in corners while he spoke with nomads, her gift erasing decades of tensions between covens that viciously mistrusted one another, it would not do to interfere.

His desire for her was not so profound that he would resent Aro's intrusion. He examined the thought's facets, found it selfish, and did not discard it.

Nonetheless, when Didyme came to him, he opened his arms and she curled into them like a blossom, her pale face crushed against his chest, lips obscenely warm, even through a fall of fabric. Caius' mind refused to linger there.

"Were you everything your brother could have hoped for?" he said. Whatever answer she gave would wound her, he knew, and welcomed the sting. Building walls between them, carved from ice and words, made everything seem easier.

His treacherous hands opened like wings on her spine.

"Yes," she said.

He had anticipated the proud toss of her head and the coppery flash of defiance brightening her grin, but the desperate push of her body, tangled around him like a climbing vine, was something alien.

"What is the matter?" he demanded, his hand toying with the stubborn slope of her chin. The inquiry came from nowhere, and the insistent flutter, apparent even through the miasma of her gift, in his chest warned him that he cared about the response she would give him.

She was all silence and softness, but he did not find that unusually endearing. Strength and steel would have pleased him more.

Brushing her curls away, he leaned close, as though aiming to kiss her throat. He found her ear instead, moulding his mouth to it.

"Your brother will never surrender anything to you," Caius cautioned, cold and fast. The notion was one he had not entertained before, but as he voiced it, its rightness startled him. "You might take what you want from him, if you're clever and persistent, but otherwise, you can expect nothing."

Heartbreak turned her eyes round and glossy. Half of him wanted to snarl and shake her, telling her that she no longer had the luxury of being a child. The rest wished to curl itself protectively around her, soothing her until she smiled once more.

It won too easily.

"I misspoke," he said stiffly. "Forgive me, Didyme."

Coaxing a smile from her was easy as pressing a gentle mouth to hers. He could taste laughter on her tongue, and soon, Caius was grinning too.

"Come hunt with me," he said, taking her hand and pulling her into the night, the blinding black that had always belonged to them.

}-o-{

Aro saw Didyme's fingers lace through Caius' when he spared the courtyard a glance, and made nothing of it. She was a warm, persistent little thing, and if it pleased her to coax affection from a man whose temperament was tainted with frost, he would not stop her.

He turned to stone moments later when the tell-tale collision of granite bodies reached his ears. His sister's waves of muffled giggles and his pale brother's surprised hiss erased the innocence of their bond immediately.

Aro could not remember being livid before. It was such an undignified emotion, marked by raised voices and carelessly smashed treasures, a sentiment to be avoided at all costs. This situation, however, warranted the bile in the pit of his belly, a black and hideous tide, surely.

What gave her the _right_ to win hearts so easily? How dare little Didyme, foolish and curious as a kitten, act against his plans, as though she was not _his?_

Those thoughts were madness. The balustrade beneath his fingers crumbled. And Aro gathered himself. Plotted, set the board and won.

His footsteps took him down long corridors, until he reached a scroll-strewn study, bright with golden candles and Marcus' kindness.

His most cherished friend raised his head in greeting.

"Dear brother," Aro murmured, "did you think that I would be displeased with you?"

He watched, delighted, as confusion painted grey with fear coloured Marcus' stoic features for half a heartbeat. His gambit, a feeble guess with no guidance, had proven itself correct, it seemed.

"I do not—" He would not finish his denial, but then, he had never been an accomplished liar.

"Didyme, of course. You may court her. I would not think to stand in the way of my sister's affairs, or yours," he said, his voice warm and peaceful as spring rain.

Marcus' glee burned deep and golden, amber caught in sunlight.

"Truly?" he said, with the shy little half-smile that did not suite an immortal half as well as a lovelorn boy.

"Indeed."

_Better you and your romanticism in my sister's hands than Caius and his wildfire loyalties, his bloody vendettas. _

Some things were best left unspoken.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>As ever, I apologize for the slow updating. Insert the usual school-is-unholy excuses here. An enormous thank-you to everyone who has reviewed and favourited this fic. I'm so glad such a random pairing has managed to find a niche for itself.


	6. wicked truths

_/wicked truths/_

Their first coupling was a war in miniature. Harsh and covetous.

Candles, clustered on every surface of Didyme's chambers like white clover, made the darkness breathe and dance. It settled itself in the hollows of her collar, the dip of her belly between her hipbones, and Caius tasted night on his tongue, along with the salt and silk of her.

She looked fierce in the half-light, he decided. Lovely, but desperate as well, curling at the edges like ruined parchment.

He could not gaze at her eyes, deep and still as drowning pools. Instead, his hips set an erratic rhythm, a rise and surge that threatened to choke him in _want_ and _need _and _warm. _Her nails scoured his spine all the while, uncaring. Ankles, fishbone sharp, pressed patterns against the small of his back, her gasps hungry and lingering in his ears.

Just before she came, Didyme fisted her little hand in his hair, so tightly that his scalp smarted.

"Mine," she whispered, and shattered into coloured glass, pulling him down with her.

She wasn't afraid, Caius though afterwards, when she was cradled beside him, her mouth chafed to the shade of plums. That was a blessing; he had never been particularly fond of treating his lovers like children.

He would not accuse her of selflessness. There were marks all over him, raw crescents and torn flesh that could not be concealed. Having such intimate betrayal scrawled over the canvas of his skin struck him as terminally stupid.

"Aro will be concerned," he said. The words were jagged in a moment that should have been sweet, flecked with kisses.

"If he finds out." Didyme twisted lazily in his embrace, her arms twining around his throat. Her thumb petted the hollow where his pulse once was.

"When," he corrected.

"Good."

She smiled, all dimples and dishevelled curls, as though this was a lover's rebellion, some grand gambit played by the heart. Caius only believed her for a moment.

}-o-{

Her brother's downfall, Didyme decided, was his curiosity. Nothing could keep Aro bound to Velathri when there were worlds contained behind the walls of cities, scattered like leaves through the northern mountains.

And dear Marcus had a way of losing himself, in words and wishes, on the paths he took when he wandered away to hunt.

It gave her too much time in Caius' company, this propensity for absence.

She wedged herself in her lover's arms insistently, every time footfalls dimmed into echoes, until he breathed something resigned into her hair, and pulled her away, to his bed or hers.

Didyme liked tenderness. It suited her, fingers like petals brushing her skin. Catching fire had its charms, but the slow, honey-and-summer surrender to sweetness pleased her more. She liked the feel of Caius beneath her as well. It was the way he looked at her, as though she was sacrosanct, a lovely statue in a torchlit shrine. As though her innocence was something transient, a thing to be corrupted slowly and exquisitely. The warmth of him beneath her hips turned to heat, welcome as sunlight.

Nonetheless, below the gentleness of Caius' hands, she saw traces of wrath, surfacing like silver scales from dark water. Something stirred within his skin, thirsty and impatient, still hunting even when he was tucked so close to her that there was no telling where he began and she ended.

His touch slipped, hurt, dug too deep.

}-o-{

Didyme made Caius so very happy.

Her mouth tasted of strawberries, and she giggled when she kissed him, as though that plain gesture filled her with delight that bubbled over. The snowy glass of her skin was pure relief to him, well-accustomed to calluses and iron. He found himself entranced with her bony little knees, the way her hair turned into a wiry, obstinate mess in his hands. Her breathing, even.

Every time he held her, surrounded by shredded sheets and splinters, he could feel her gift making its way, snakelike, through his veins. Sometimes, he laughed and it resounded like a growl trapped in his chest.

And he wished, so hard that it was practically prayer.

If Aro's precious sister happened to be his mate, their bond would be half-sacred, untouchable by Marcus' sticky fingers and Aro's demands. What he could do with an implied eternity lingering between the pair of them, hundreds of deaths and years to indulge in, to tear and fight and drown—

But he remembered being in love, as only an awkward boy with scabs and scars could be. It had hurt and stolen his breath, leaving his lungs punctured and ragged, but it had been so vividly, viscerally _true_.

Waiting for that feeling bored him.

"What are you thinking about?" Didyme said, winding her nails through his hair. She enjoyed the shimmer of colourless strands between her fingers, for some reason, and he had never bothered to ask why.

"You. You are very—pretty." Caius squirmed like a child on the unfamiliar softness of Didyme's bed, a snow bank of cushions trapped beneath him.

"How unexciting," she grinned, with no real condemnation.

"I could think of something more interesting if you give me a moment."

Didyme murmured a handful of words, disparaging and amused in equal parts, her lips tickling his ribs like moth-wings.

}-o-{

Marcus knew what he was. He had examined himself long ago, and found a scholarly creature, with a solemn face and bony limbs. He had little skill at deception, undercut further by the childish faith that very few deserved to be deceived. Even his gift could not convince him to meddle.

"You were intended to be a philosopher, brother," Aro had said once, and Marcus wore that title contentedly.

And he knew what Caius was. _Soldier_, in his case, was the polite term for _leashed monster_. He broke everything he touched with eager hands, then laughed at the ruin.

All Marcus had to do was wait a little while, until the bond that tied his pale brother to Didyme turned to bloody rags. Caius would never disappoint in that regard.

He told himself so, at least, when red drowned his vision, the seeping, ugly stain of jealousy.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>As ever, I thank everyone who read and reviewed the previous chapter.

This fic, along with _The Wolf in the Fable_ have been nominated for the Shimmer Awards. If you are interested in looking at the nominees, please proceed to **shimmerawards (dot) blogspot (dot) com. **My gratitude goes out to the person who did the nominating.

Last but not least, I wish all of you a Happy New Year! Hopefully, it still counts if I do so on January 4th.


	7. a circle of lights

_/ a circle of lights /_

"Brother," Marcus said politely. The temptation to tear at his rival's throat was a fever, tinged with sickly, sullen heat. Held in check only by the surety that he could not win, he guarded his speech and smiled like a fool.

The afternoon sun turned Caius' features to ice, shimmering but too cold to touch.

"I have heard disturbing news," he continued. "There is a coven of nomads in the south. Newborn or exceedingly reckless, I'm told. Prone to massacring entire settlements in a night's time."

Appeasing was his duty, but the threat of retribution was Caius' realm; this situation demanded the latter.

His pale companion sighed.

"Why must they do this?" A month with no _disturbances_ is not too much to ask."

Marcus nearly grinned. His wolfish brother had never been so reluctant to leave Velathri; that reticence betrayed him more than the scent of pomegranate clinging to his hair.

"Perhaps you should emphasize that point," he suggested.

"I intend to," Caius said, sweeping past him, a frown marring his features with clumsy strokes.

Marcus embraced his solitude, gilded with the promise of Didyme's company, as he would a lover. The dying light turned his eyes to fire, as the hiss of his companion's cloak heralded his departure.

}-o-{

"Where is Aro?" Didyme demanded that night. She appeared in Marcus' library without knocking, barefoot and clad in a tunic that showed her knees beneath a flower-spattered hem. He did not permit his gaze to linger.

He marvelled at her arrogance, and adored it in the next instant. She had hungry embers for a heart, it seemed, and immortality could not have granted her anything lovelier.

"I cannot say. Your brother has a tendency to disappear for months," he admitted.

Aro wandered to Graecia and Aigyptos whenever he pleased, losing himself among philosophers and god-kings, returning home with rusty sand on his feet and his head filled with dreams that tasted of dominion. Marcus had always been indulgent.

"And Caius?"

She sounded displeased, as though her favourite plaything had been taken from her indefinitely.

"Give him a week or so," he said.

"Just you and me, then," she sighed, collapsing dramatically on an oaken chair that her brother loved to occupy, albeit with rigid posture.

And really, that was perfect.

}-o-{

The earth was more clay than soil beneath Didyme's hands. Bloody and damp, it clung to her palms, but she toyed with it regardless, crumbling clots between her fingers.

The tiles of the courtyard had fissured long ago, beneath the pressure of footfalls and time. Nobody had bothered to repair them. Aro did not trouble himself with the trivial, but she found it impossibly ugly. Although she was convinced of the task's futility, she rested on her knees at the atrium's corner, coaxing choking weeds away from dying blossoms that peeked shyly from between the cracks.

The urge to disguise decay shocked her with its urgency.

"Can I help you?" Marcus offered, kneeling beside her. Only silence had announced his appearance.

He was tall and lanky, elbows and knees everywhere. The absence of grace was counterbalanced by playfulness, a certain dance of light in his darkening eyes. Didyme found herself smiling.

"What do you know about flowers?" she said, swiping quick little fingers through her hair.

"Nothing," he admitted.

"Me neither." She pulled a weed out by the root and tossed it aside, onto a heap of silvery-green leaves that were already beginning to curl in the sun. He imitated her motions, and plucked something purple and feathery from the earth.

"_That_," she said, "was a hyacinth."

"I think I killed it."

She laughed then, free from brothers and empires and the cool tide of deathlessness, a handful of crushed petals tickling her skin. Didyme could not name the source of her joy, but she missed it as soon as it had passed.

}-o-{

Didyme longed for Caius. The heat was an itch, a tightness of the skin that she could not remedy. She had only absence and emptiness for comfort; turning to Marcus for company came easily.

He had his haunts in the villa. The library belonged to him, tended by cautious, gentle hands, and the catacombs beneath the earth. Perhaps they had been crypts once, but they became vaults for treasure once immortals had stolen the dwelling from its human owners. Aro had told her so, pleased with himself.

She descended into the bleakness below with cautious steps, shuffling her feet on roughened stone. The habit remained, though she was no longer mortal and in no danger of falling.

"What are you doing here?"

As always, Marcus flickered to her side, a surprising companion but a welcome one as well.

"Exploring," she said. Gasping torchlight made Marcus seem wild, a creature of angles and stone.

"In the dark, rather like a bat," he noted, teasing.

She liked it when he smiled, she found. There was nothing fierce or reluctant in the expression, and that had its charms.

"Are you trying to hide something from me?" she said, matching his grin with hers. "Is that why you do not want me here?"

"Of course. I am terribly mysterious."

"No doubt," she murmured.

In a moment, their banter became a game, a vampires' rendition of hiding and finding amidst blackness and passages that bent like old branches. Seeking Marcus by scent , the warm spill of candlewax and parchment that accompanied him, posed no challenge but she delighted in it nonetheless.

He had a way of making her feel as though she was suffused with light.

}-o-{

The newborn coven that Marcus had spoken of proved itself more troublesome than expected. An unlikely allegiance of six nomads displeased Caius; their leader's resilience to reason was another matter entirely. A future of ashy villages and whispering mortals stretched before him, and he bristled, something cold and unpleasant slithering in his belly.

Helplessness tasted like bile in his mouth.

Nonetheless, when he thought of exchanged words and protective growls torn from half a dozen throats, his mind strayed to a girl, significant in no way save one. She stood, tall and pale-haired, beside her coven-mates and grinned at him as though they shared a secret. He didn't understand; the memory was a barb beneath his skin.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>Well, that was a speedy update, all things considered. And now all four members of this convoluted relationship quadrangle are in the picture, however briefly. I am remarkably excited for the next few chapters.

Thank you to those that read and reviewed the previous chapter.


	8. estranged existence

_/ estranged existence /_

After a handful of days, Marcus' life was a well-known tale to Didyme, and one that she did not mind hearing again.

His memories of mortality had long since turned to fragments, but those clouded remnants were lovely despite their incompletion, their brokenness. The world offered him warmth and he took it, cradling it between gentle fingers until it blazed. Darkness, though it bruised him here and there, did not steal that fire from him.

Marcus _surprised_ her, as nothing had after she opened red eyes and saw her dead brother's smile. Aro had told her that only the cunning could endure an eternity; Caius' scars in their ugly constellations reminded her that strength, brutal and heavy as steel, was a necessity. Her black-haired companion lacked these traits, but reproaching him resembled blasphemy.

"You are—strange," she announced, knowing no other word for his shortcomings that were also strengths.

"Yes," he agreed, settling by her side and watching the light die, swallowed by the horizon.

"Unlike anyone I have met before."

"I could say the same about you," he said.

Didyme's mind darted to Caius, who thought she was pretty and yielded to her with the sweetest reluctance imaginable. She caught Marcus' wince, a twitch at the corner of her eye. The gesture looked painful, wound-raw.

"Tell me about your gift," she said, and the slow tide of his voice restored peace between them.

}-o-{

Caius worried.

He had a gift for concocting nightmares, imaginary places where everything fell to ruin and plans turned to mist beneath his fingers. It was all too easy to invent a thousand downfalls when his brothers dreamed with such intensity that the waking world fell away.

He considered curling into Didyme's embrace when he returned to the granite confines he shared with her, whispering his fear into the lines of her throat, but threw that thought aside. His lover had no interest in rule, the weave of threats and allegiances that he memorized and Aro loved.

The road to Velathri was brief and unending all at once.

}-o-{

The courtyard was a mess of growing flowers, and Caius wondered how they had gotten there. The flimsy, lovely gesture carried the distinct mark of Didyme's good intentions.

As though summoned by the thought, she appeared behind him, tousled and bright and so very happy.

The sentiment he felt had no name, but it fluttered with lazy wings in his throat.

"I missed you," she said, a statement and a demand which Caius refused to obey. Somehow, she has managed to tangle herself around him, her little hands soft and teasing on the knotted sinew of his shoulders. Melting into her touch was a small act of surrender; he resisted it.

Marcus was not far away. The scent of him lingered, draped over Didyme like a cloak.

"Enough to forget caution," Caius snarled. Jealousy enraged him, as did the intimation of carelessness.

"Marcus knows. How could he not?" she said, flinching from him. Cool confusion touched her features like frost, and he could not bring himself to regret startling her.

"Is it so difficult for you to keep a secret?"

"Why are we keeping it, precisely?" Her fingers, long and slim, pressed into his skin, nails leaving raw crescents in their wake.

The question choked him. Explaining to her—dear, fawn-eyed Didyme who loved her brother— that Aro wanted her to be a tool in his blossoming wars, a thing to be used and not shared, struck him as impossible and thankless in equal parts.

"_Why_? What is so terrible about us—?" she demanded once more, her brows dark and angled, more sullen than frightening.

"You belong to your brother," he said. "Marcus wants you."

He did not intend to sound so weary, but something bone-deep and broken clung to his words nonetheless.

"That does not matter." The tilt of her chin turned defiant.

He remembered the crook of her leg over his hip, the way she smiled at him as the sun rose, delighted by the play of red light on the pallor of his spine, and spoke the first cruel thought he could find.

"I will not fight for you. Gods know you will never be free of them otherwise."

"I am not—" _Weak_ was the word she did not say, and he would not voice it for her.

"You are," Caius hissed and turned from her, seeking silence and shadows, some respite for the dull ache in his chest.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>I apologize for the short chapter. I aimed to make it a little longer, but it refused. Hopefully the next update will be a little speedier.

This story, among several others including _A Thousand Stairs _and _A Pink Carnation and a Pick-Up Truck _have been nominated for the Sunflower Awards. If you are interested in reading the other nominated fics and participating in the voting process, please head over to **http:/thesunflowerawards(dot)blogspot(dot)co****m. ** My thanks to the person who nominated my stories.

Thank you to those who reviewed the previous chapter.


	9. all that is left

_/all that is left/_

Aro returned to a home in shambles.

Caius' moods veered, rudderless as a storm-battered ship, between sullen silence and thrashing rage. Marcus sulked, preferring solitude, his dark brows carved into angles. And Didyme, the flickering, petal-lipped catalyst, gazed at him with innocent eyes, her arms open in charming welcome.

Accompanied only by the whisper of a mud-hemmed cloak, he ushered his sweet sister into the crumbling stillness of his chambers when his brothers were away. She had explored them thoroughly in his absence, nosy little thing, but the intimacy of the gesture had its uses.

When she had settled into a low chair, its feet carved into lions' claws and hers resting on a mosaic of serpents in sinuous battle, he looked at her, assessing her worth.

"Darling Didyme, you have become majestic," Aro announced. His hand tumbled onto her shoulder, allowing a thousand thoughts to drown him. Her mind was a flood, a deluge of colour and light, made reckless by youth.

"Truly?"

He nodded, allowing pride to gild his smile. His creation had every right to be extraordinary. "Beyond any of my imaginings." Carefully, artfully, he creased his forehead, placid concern shadowing his irises. "But your gentle heart is not shared by all."

"I know that." Her insistence was accompanied by a stubborn toss of dark curls.

"Your actions stray close to toying with both Caius and Marcus." The pair of them were moments away from one another's throats, snarling like mongrels and too savage to soothe. So foolishly ruled by winding whims and lust. Aro could not pretend to understand, though his palms had pressed eagerly against theirs at every unguarded opportunity.

"They are not kind. I would not have sought them if they were," he continued slowly, savouring the words. "I fear what they will do to one another—and to you— when your affections are discovered."

Didyme wilted like a blossom beneath frost, shoulders shattering silently, and Aro nearly smiled. He imagined that it would be harder to convince her of his brothers' cruelty, after she had tasted their kisses and heard what shy secrets they offered her, as all men did when her gift caressed them. Padding closer, a sated cat, he wrapped his sister in an embrace that lacked all the clumsiness of fraternal affection.

"I will protect you, of course, my sweet." he whispered, stroking her hair. "But you must heed my words."

_Mine_, his thoughts sang. _Mine to rule, to lead, to place on the board where I choose. _

}-o-{

Caius had never seen Didyme in the open sunlight. It had always been gloom for them, the lavender shroud of evening, the rusted heat of summer caught between walls. The glimmer of red-gold braided into her dark hair and the subtle aberration of shimmering skin were erotic in their novelty.

But he did not want her there.

Her absence brought peace with it. He could imagine an eternity like this, where he was not hers, and Aro didn't watch him with hungry, angry eyes. Loyalty returned too, the comforting memory of calling Marcus brother with a little patience and unclenched teeth.

It would be easier that way. More bitter, perhaps, but when had that mattered?

"I am sorry," she said, darting close and closer, but never quite pressing her hand into his. Her smile sparkled and threatened to splinter like struck crystal.

"What for?" The question was too sharp, too quick, and she flinched a little.

"I hurt you," she admitted. Emptiness curled between them like smoke, mimicking the tendrils of her hair.

"You angered me," he corrected, resigned. There was no use lying to her about that.

"A common occurrence," she said, with a smile that was new and hopeful and bright, just-poured copper.

"Yes."

"Am I forgiven, then?" Her skin was crisp beneath his touch, nothing like the softness he expected for no good reason.

Of course she was. She did not have to try in that regard.

"Am I?" he said.

He expected her to giggle and balance on her toes to kiss him, all strawberries and lashes and so much sweetness that it practically burned his throat. The small breath of relief and the slow lifting of fear in her gaze surprised him.

Didyme had never been frightened of him before.

His mind careened between vindication and the urge to apologize, making a thousand promises he would not keep. And, utterly unbidden, the memory of a fair-haired girl who smirked at his rage tugged at him politely.

That did not appease him.

Instead, he kissed Didyme hard and willingly, falling onto the grass beside her. When she touched him with curious hands, he remained statue-still, permitting her to memorize the bony angles of his features, the fall of his hair beneath her fingertips. She was comparing, the practical part of his mind whispered, making neat little lists entitled _Caius _and _Marcus_, picking favourites between the pair. If it had been anyone else, he would have his teeth buried in their throat until the screams turned to choking, but this was Didyme.

He remained silent.

Grazed her pale shoulders with his lips. Said _good-bye_ and _I'm not sorry_ and _I am lying _with callused fingers and practised unease.

Caius wondered if she noticed.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>I apologize for the slowness of my updates and the overabundance of angsty Caius. One of these things will be fixed in the next chapter, and it's probably the latter. As always, thank you to those reading and reviewing this story.


	10. serendipity

_/ serendipity /_

Before Marcus' curious gaze, the bond between Didyme and Caius turned to cobwebs, evanescent and pale. A breath, and it shivered. It would not withstand a touch. Such a quiet, bitter end could not be of her doing, he reminded himself, imagining her flower-shaped lips forming ugly words and finding it impossible.

His own hunger startled him then, waking like some sinuous, starving creature, making itself known through hurt and want and claws in his throat.

She could be _his_ now, cherished and protected.

His eyes turned to obsidian then, thin fingers set in painful knots; he did not notice until his touch fissured marble.

}-o-{

Didyme felt older. Heavier too, as though time had stitched itself like silver thread into her skirts and tethered her to the ground. Something inhabited her chest, dull and throbbing and heart-like, but she brushed it aside.

Facing Marcus with weakness within wasn't wise. He could probably see it, a flash of telltale red in dark water. She raised her chin and her gaze.

Shadows puddled around them, vestiges of a sunset that had bled over the horizon.

"I know that you love me," she told him, eyes vivid with the dying light. She would have giggled once, her lashes falling in spiky crescents over cheeks made bony by a lack of smiles, but the gesture was childlike. Too readily dismissed. Iron cut her voice instead, and it struck her suddenly that she resembled Caius in that moment.

Marcus examined the accusation, tracing its shape with callused fingers, and finding it pleasing.

"I have never tried to hide it," he agreed mildly, though night engulfed his irises like a rising tide as soon as she spoke.

"Can you forgive me for doing the opposite?" It was a gamble, not a question.

And then, the space between them turned airless and heated, only spanned by a brush of lips. Their first kiss was an experiment, an uncertainty. His fingertips explored her cheekbones, the arches of her brows, a splash of curls tumbling near her ears, each caress devastatingly gentle.

"I would forgive you anything," he said, the words a mere blur against her skin.

_Good_, she thought, aiming for detachment and finding herself lost along the way. Warm hands twined at the base of her spine, neither caging nor cloying. Shelter lingered in his touch, and she preferred it to the taste of fire.

"You think too highly of me," she murmured.

"Never."

Once again, she was on tiptoe, her mouth a brand upon his flesh, all want and possession, an unmaking and a creation caught in the middle. _Hers, hers, hers_ took the place of a heartbeat, and she grinned at the absolute rightness of it.

}-o-{

The ring was a plain thing, made of iron and heavy upon Didyme's finger, but she smiled when it caught the light regardless. Marcus' promises in tangible form were so like him in their honest strength, their simplicity. She did not mind the small reversion to mortal traditions—welcomed it even as a token of her love's sentiments that could be worn where Aro saw.

Caius could not be expected to attend the wedding, less of a celebration than an exchange of oaths and kisses, and he did not disappoint, unwilling to linger by the ruins.

}-o-{

Caius burned.

With neither caution nor care, he set the low hills aflame, slaughtering the nuisance allegiance of nomadic newborns, one by one by one. They tore his flesh to scraps before dying, but that was nothing.

The blistered interior of his ribs, a vacant and phantom pain, was another matter entirely.

For reasons that he struggled to name, as only a creature just embracing subtlety could, he did not pursue the pale-haired woman he had seen once before, though she was the final member of her coven left living. It would have been such a simple thing to hunt her, for she watched him often, barefoot and fine-boned, some sort of persistent spectre flickering at the periphery and vanishing before he could speak.

Once, at the ashy conclusion of a vicious struggle, while he fed twitching remains to the fire, she darted closer than she had previously dared.

"That," she told him, surveying the carnage before her, "was unnecessarily dramatic."

"Why will you not flee? I do not grant second chances." His snarl was low and ugly.

"I believe you already have. A third and a fourth, even."

The woman tossed a predator's knowing grin over her shoulder, blade-swift, before slipping away into her shadows.

Caius had never refused a contest.

}-o-{

Her name was Athenodora, a graceless Grecian mouthful that suited her well. She laughed out loud when Caius told her so, but then, humour came to her easily.

The first time they fucked—brief and so eager that he left quick-healing fingerprints like petals all over her hips and she carved careless patterns into his back—her lips had softened into a true smile, while her demanding little hands took and took. And Caius, suddenly forgetting everything but the tangle of cornsilk hair beneath his palms, wondered.

"I will see you again," she said afterwards, as though it was a perfect certainty.

"When?"

Blood-eyed and quick, she shrugged. It was promise enough.

}-o-{

And Aro observed, through touch and inference, smirking like a cat. His brothers had fallen into place so neatly, divergent affections lending them civility. Soon, so very soon that he could taste its sweetness upon his tongue, they'd be his once more, no longer dreaming of the forbidden.

Later, he would curse himself for overlooking Didyme, a deceptively demure curl of silk and sunlight in her mate's arms.

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE: <strong>One more chapter, and we're done. Thank you for sticking around, reading and reviewing. I greatly appreciate it.


	11. the dark things you fear

**/ the dark things you fear /**

No one told Athenodora what had preceded her arrival in Velathri but then, she had never needed telling. Instead, she pressed herself into crowded corners and spattered shadows, gulping secrets down like blood. She knew how young she looked on Caius' arm, how gawky, but she did not mind. Casual confessions were spilled into her open palms, because a precious girl, a faltering newborn half in love, was no danger.

Marcus was the simplest to pin into place, so warm and glad and besotted with the apple-cheeked little thing whom he had wed. Theirs was the affection of lovers in fables, but Athenodora had no patience with stories. A quick look, and there it was—the shiver, the ugly desperation beneath his caresses. _If I am very, very good_, he seemed to scream, _will you promise not to leave?_

After that, she tried to be kind to him. Quiet and gentle, a child by a sickbed.

Didyme was another matter. She blazed, a flame cradled in glass, and did not care who noticed. Something about her—the cool edge of iron beneath her features, the ripe-berry sweetness of her smile—commanded breathless reverence. And she was watchful. Her gaze followed Athenodora with delicate precision and the same savage thirst that darkened her brother's eyes. Occasionally, when the pair of them fit their hands together and forgot to muffle their giggles, a convincing pantomime of girlish friendship, the silvery woman didn't restrain a shudder, pulling away so suddenly that it could not be overlooked.

And Caius, her fierce, too-harsh lover, had veins of uncertainty running through him, marrow-deep and obvious. When she made him laugh in the soft blackness of their rooms, she caught the blur of shock across his features that did not suit him at all. Athenodora curled around him then, permitting him to do what he wished with her. It startled her, every time, when his hands were tender, so light that he might have been touching treasure.

}-o-{

"Caius!" Aro sang, lilting and gleeful. "We have not spoken like this for so long."

The white-haired man raised a brow, his hands neatly pressed together on the edge of his companion's desk.

"Oh, do not look so sour. We both know that Sulpicia is better company than you are," he said, grinning.

"Why are you not with her now?"

Aro's expression turned sombre then, the hollows of his features stern and suddenly unsubtle. "I need your advice on a less-than-pleasant matter. Something with which I would not trouble my wife."

"Yes?" Caius said, turning his gaze to the blue-bright flutter of candlelight, wary of the regret in his brother's voice. Beeswax wept and pooled on pitted wood while the air dripped with the scent of curdled honey.

" How will we manage without Marcus and Didyme? They wish to leave us permanently," the black-haired man mused. It was the sighing inquiry of an affectionate sibling, but sharpness cut through the corners.

"Poorly." The half-truth came easily; Caius could not quite bring himself to praise Marcus' gift, nor malign Didyme's.

"Do you think we can, ah, persevere regardless?" Aro said lightly. The promise of a storm, an unsteady future, stole the light from the room.

"No."

"How concise of you." His laughter was frayed, too cool and high for sincerity.

"There is nothing else to say." For an instant, Caius viewed the world as his brother saw it, orderly and pristine. His darling little sister was dangerously out of place, a freewheeling, feral thing and that would not do.

"You are unexpectedly helpful sometimes. Did you know that?"Aro said, in dismissal and praise.

}-o-{

The dull curtain of rainwater whispering against red rock was so familiar, so meshed with memories of summery smiles and the slow sweep of strange surrender, that Caius almost grinned, dry and cracked and stripped of joy.

"Nothing changes, I see," Didyme said. Her gaze was a black shock after years of averted eyes and hurried conversations.

"And you are not content with that." No sentiment escaped alongside the words.

"You have no right to fault me for wanting to leave," she said. "And even if you do, I will not change my decision."

Time had not made her adept at turning her features to stone. Bitterness simmered beneath, as she wondered why no-one—not her brother, the lover she had once adored, the spun-gold creatures she called sisters—begged her to stay. Didyme did not know how to be an afterthought.

For a rushed and stinging moment, Caius considered pleading, falling on his knees and looking up, as a penitent mortal would. The gesture, utterly unlike him and shameful to contemplate, would convince her to remain in Volterra. Buy her life. Keep her safe from Aro's plans, insidious, poison-sugared concoctions to the last, ending with choking silence.

And then, he didn't. Her burdens had stopped being his a century ago.

Instead, he touched her chin, patience taking the place of gentleness. "I did not find you to fight with you," he said. "I only wanted to say my farewells."

Didyme's smile was a stroke of sunlight, a beautiful unravelling.

"You are altogether too dire, my darling Caius. I will visit Velathri at every opportunity."

"Of course," he agreed, pressing a kiss onto the soft swell of her cheek. Beneath his lips, her skin was warm, flushed the ghostly pink of crushed petals.

Caius broke away too soon, throat suffused with the phantom scrape of ashes.

[-]

"Athenodora?"

The rain was not enough to bring her indoors, but she slipped to Caius' side when he called, damp-haired and happy.

"We should go away for a while," he said. "Do you want to?"

He anticipated the glee in her grin, but not the swift clench of her hand around his.

"Are you certain?" she said, too knowing and a little afraid.

"Yes." Later, he would tell her that there were some things he refused to witness, that distance made lies easier to live and to repeat.

The departure was quiet and quick, devoid of goodbyes because timelessness had erased that need first.

}-o-{

The homecoming was wretched.

_fin_

* * *

><p><strong>AUTHOR'S NOTE:<strong> And we're done! Some thank-yous are in order. First, to **Merina2** who suggested the principle pairing to me, and made a good case for it, besides "It's hot," which was my ever-so-nuanced interpretation. Secondly, to** Arianna-Janae**, who wrote a lovely recommendation-review of this fic on **The LUV'NV**. Finally, to all of you, who read, reviewed, favourited and put up with months between updates._  
><em>


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